1 - Social Theory
Abstracts by Theme, in panel order, and keynotes
Theme: Critical theory’s methodologies
Panel 1
Patrick O’Mahony, School of Sociology and Philosophy, University College Cork
Rethinking Cosmopolitan Democracy: On the Institutionalization of Cosmopolitan Publicness
Today, there is a renaissance of communicative theories of democracy as evidenced by the rise of deliberative and discursive accounts. The latter two approaches could potentially complement one another but presently belong to differently articulated philosophical and social theoretical projects with little overlap. This paper explores the potential for such overlap, for combining theories and methodologies of viewing democracy and democratization. Greater interplay will assist with understanding the nature and significance of different versions of ‘publicness’, the essence of a communicative account of democracy, as they become resituated in response to emergent cosmopolitan challenges.
Arnold L. Farr
Philosophy, Kentucky University
The Deconstructive Turn in Dialectical Thinking: Rethinking Herbert Marcuse’s Critical Method
In recent decades there has been an uneasy relationship between critical theory and postmodernism. Both movements are viewed as radical and progressive yet each accuses the other of being conservative. I will not attempt to address this particular issue here. I take it for granted that both movements have a progressive orientation. However, despite the progressive orientation of both movements, there remains the possibility of both of them becoming victim of a type of political paralysis.
In this paper I will attempt to rescue both by revisiting the critical theory of Herbert Marcuse. While Marcuse was a critical theorist and member of the Marxist tradition, and would not take kindly to being aligned with postmodernists, I believe that his theoretical approach opens the door for a critical method that makes proper use of the best critical insights from critical theory and postmodernism.
In this paper I will first situate Marcuse as a dialectical thinker. I will compare and contrast the dialectic in Hegel, Marx, and Marcuse to show how the dialectic advances in Marcuse’s work. Ultimately, I will argue that Marcuse’s use of the dialectic takes us further than that of Hegel and Marx. I will then show that in Marcuse’s work the dialectic becomes a form of deconstruction which avoids some of the problems that haunt the theories of Marx and Hegel. This will demonstrate the possibility of keeping alive the micro level theorizing of postmodernism as well as the macro level theorizing of critical theory and Marxism. Finally, I will show that reviving Marcuse in the aftermath of postmodernism will provide us with radically new and effective theoretical tools for an emancipatory critique of the contemporary world.
Theme: Critical theory’s methodologies
Panel 2
Kevin W. Gray
Instructor of Philosophy, Department of International Studies, American University of Sharjah
Teubner or Habermas: What Type of Systems Theory Best Reflects Society?
Habermas, in his later work, has argued vociferously against autopoietic systems theory, claiming that it fails to capture the role of substitution in media in modern society. His earlier work (for instance, The Theory of Communicative Action), never fully abandoned, argues that modern society is structured by realms (i.e. action systems such as the economy and government) that are in turn non-communicative in some important way. For instance, even in his work in Between Facts and Norms, Habermas argued that attempts to introduce an autopoietic model of law failed to capture the underlying system-lifeworld binary of modern society.
In my PhD dissertation, I argued that Habermas’ system-lifeworld binary needs to be abandoned because it is inconsistent with his political aims. Moreover, as I have argued in other places, it is also inconsistent with his legal philosophy. However, in this paper, I intend to argue that, notwithstanding these other objections, Habermas’ own conception of human nature and the social is incompatible with his neo-Parsonian systems theory. I will argue, following work by Misgeld and others, that not only is neo-Parsonian systems theory incompatible with Habermas’ model of a communicatively structured society, but that Teubner’s work on Luhmann’s autopoietic systems theory is a better candidate for social theory and better reflects Habermas’ theory of the human and the social.
Mason Richey
Assistant Professor
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
Department of European Studies, Graduate School of International and Area Studies
Seoul, South Korea
Many advocates for deliberative democracy view this family of approaches to politics prescriptively—and indeed concretely so, as achievable in some form and to some extent. This view registers the extension of deliberative democracy from the theoretical and normative domain to that of empirical, experiment-based investigation. This is a positive step, and one consonant with critical theory’s original impulses. Yet it is not clear that deliberative democracy theorists and empirical investigators are not still talking past one another. More seriously, the debate about the feasibility of deliberative democracy—which experiments are designed to demonstrate or discredit—involves a question that empirical investigation itself has extreme difficulty answering: are experimental studies of deliberative democracy measuring the right things?
My paper will first introduce the results of several political psychology studies examining the problematic affective and cognitive processing of political information that is generally considered to defeat deliberative democracy. Then I will turn to a presentation of three recent empirical studies of deliberation that can be interpreted to counter the findings of the aforementioned political psychology studies. Finally, then, I will turn to the issue of whether these studies measure anything like what it is necessary to understand in order to develop a better idea of whether or not deliberative democracy can potentially grow in the wider political culture.
Siobhan O'Sullivan, University College Cork
The Methodology of Critical Theory: Justice and Democracy in an Unequal World
One of the ever-present issues that the world faces is how to deal with both the legacy of colonialism and unjust, undemocratic and often violent rule. In the case of recently democratised countries, such as South Africa, and the potentials emerging in North Africa, coming to terms with the past necessitates a period of reparation and
redistribution to empower those formerly excluded and support reconciliation. This
connection between the ideals of civil-political and socio-economic transformation has been the subject of much recent political, philosophical and sociological discussion, although it has a far longer lineage to earlier revolutions and the aims of ‘liberté, equalité, fraternité’.
This paper draws from the normative theoretical work of a range of critical theorists
including Fraser, Honneth, Habermas, and Sen to explicate these interconnections. It argues that political equality in a democracy (understood as popular sovereignty and deliberation) is dependent on some level of material equality (i.e. redistribution and reparation) and equal respect in social relations (i.e. recognition and solidarity). This recent theoretical work draws on the concerns and ideals of contemporary social movements across the world to argue for the constitutive inter-linking of justice and democracy, such that, as Fraser (2005, p.87) articulates, what was once “called “the theory of social justice’ now appears as ‘the theory of democratic justice’”. However, the theorists in question recognise the constraints on the institutionalisation of such ideals. Of particular concern is how “the influences of power and interest politics”, such as a globally supported neo-liberal ideology that prioritises a certain form of economics, block new possibilities and render certain peoples and parts of civil society invisible and excluded (Forst, 2007, p.297). Hence, political and socio-economic equality remain as yet unfulfilled promises across the world.
Theme: Phenomenology
Panel 3.
Chris Lawn, Philosophy, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick.
From Hermeneutics to Weak Thought
Since the debates about the role of positivism in the human sciences in the middle of the last century, hermeneutic philosophy, with special reference to Gadamer’s Truth and Method, stands as a powerful bulwark against such a tendency. Nevertheless, the general features of hermeneutics, with its emphasis upon the centrality of dialogue and interpretation - for many continental philosophers, part of the received wisdom of the age- are now seen by some as increasingly vapid and innocuous. More than this, the hermeneutical philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, depending as it does upon an overarching and overbearing notion of the (Western) tradition, is politically conservative and lacking in the philosophical resources for critical thought.
Paradoxically these criticisms of hermeneutics come from within its own ranks in the work of Gianni Vattimo. One of Italy’s foremost philosophers and public intellectuals, Vattimo, one-time student and translator of Gadamer, seeks not to invalidate hermeneutics but push it in a more radical direction. The claim is that when Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics is brought more evidently into proximity with Nietzsche and Heidegger he readily emerges as a postmodern anti-foundationalist. From this amalgamation Vattimo advances the idea of ‘weak thought’ (as opposed to the ‘strong’ thought of the dominant metaphysical tradition).
This paper explores the idea of ‘weak thought’ and explicates its origins in hermeneutic philosophy. It further examines Vattimo’s claim that ‘weak thought’ makes way not for a destructive or negative nihilism but one that is both optimistic and emancipatory.
In the last part of this paper there will be an assessment of the implications of Vattimo’s position for political and social thought especially in the idea of what he calls an ‘ontology of actuality’.
Niall Keane, Philosophy, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick
Heidegger’s Debt to Husserl: Philosophical Conversion and Phenomenological Method
This paper interprets the existential-ontology of Heidegger’s Being and Time as a further attempt to radically refashion the phenomenological epoché and reduction by delineating the additional methodic components of phenomenological ‘construction’ and ‘destruction.’ However, by returning to the issues of ‘conscience’ and ‘being-guilty’ in Being and Time, this paper attempts to map Heidegger’s three moments of ‘reduction,’ ‘construction’ and ‘destruction’ onto his three earlier moments of: 1) the reductive “call of conscience”, 2) the constructive – projective – understanding of the call as “wanting-to-have-a-conscience” and, 3) the resolutely destructive moment of “being-guilty”. By following these three interconnected moments, this paper attempts to trace Heidegger’s phenomenological refashioning of Husserl’s reduction along the lines of an initially incipient, methodologically negative reduction to the full-fledged and positive stages of phenomenological ‘construction’ and ‘destruction’. What makes Heidegger’s three phenomenological moments distinctive is that they continue to lead us back from a naïve form of ‘appearance’ and ‘speaking’ to a phenomenologically deepened form of ‘appearance’ and ‘speaking’ that announces itself as an immanent otherness that resides within the ontological modality of Dasein. Such an immanent hetero-affection is, I contend, best explicated by the above three steps: an incipient ‘reduction’ via ‘the call of conscience,’ a positively ‘constructive’ response via ‘wanting-to-have-a-conscience’ and the ‘destructive’ moment of ‘being-guilty.’ This third destructive moment is the phenomenologically transformed attitude of ‘speaking’ and ‘appearing’ that opens Dasein to its historical ‘being-guilty’ (SZ: 277). It is, I submit, this potentially disclosive ‘conversion’ of viewpoint which is the genuine yield of Heidegger’s three-fold movement through Husserl’s reduction.
Unlike Husserl’s itinerary, however, this moment of conversion or modification is no longer oriented towards the pure “…transcendental life of consciousness and its noetic-noematic experiences…” (GA 24: 29), i.e. especially its epistemic accomplishments, yet nonetheless it leaves the doxastic validity of the everyday standpoint suspended (SZ: 299). Hence, still following Husserl’s methodological lead, Heidegger’s own phenomenological abstention continues to bring to light a distinction between two remarkably different attitudes and the two distinctly shifting ‘selves’ that necessarily belong to these two interwoven fields and to the very fabric of phenomenology as such.
Notwithstanding the marked differences between Husserl’s way(s) of carrying out the phenomenological reduction and Heidegger’s three-fold appropriation of it, I argue that the most compelling interpretation of the early Heidegger emerges when he is read as a phenomenologist in the Husserlian vein; a phenomenologist who at times openly admits to the sources of his own phenomenological thesis and, at other times, neglects to do so. Even if Husserl refused to recognise it, these further structural and methodological similarities undeniably bespeak of a radical affinity between the two phenomenologists, an affinity evinced by the terms ‘vocation’ and ‘conversion’.
Julia Jansen & Tony O’Connor, Philosophy, University College Cork
Phenomenology and the Social
Intentionality is commonly viewed as being primarily a matter of individual desires, motives etc., and confined to the mental realm. This view has negatively affected critical attitudes to phenomenology, which for many has become an unfashionable style of continental European philosophy, and which has been replaced by the hermeneutical stress on tradition, Foucault’s focus on epistemes (cultural spaces of knowledge and action), and the contemporary Marxist concern with how a new socialist culture may become a genuine world culture, etc.
We shall argue that intentionality is as much a matter of social, as of individual, consciousness, which may be appreciated from Husserl’s notion of the Lebenswelt (lifeworld), Heidegger’s concept of In-Der-Welt-Sein (being-in-the-world) and Merleau-Ponty’s account of Umwelt (environment), among other notions. When the socio-historical character of intentionality is recognised critically, it is evident that phenomenology contains the potentials and resources to offer robust interpretations of the concerns of contemporary critics of phenomenology, as well as of traditional philosophical questions. A central problem here is that of the relation between explanation of the world in causal, physicalist terms, such as occurs in the natural sciences, and intentional explanation that seems to appeal either to transcendental or empirical grounds, which latter are held by many to have strong contextual influences.
Our core argument is that the intentional is inherently cultural and, as such, central to the collective life of historical societies and their life histories, as well as to the life histories of the individuals, groups, institutions and disciplines that constitute them. We contend, therefore, that intentional phenomena have intrinsically interpretable properties. This gives rise to critical questions about whatever displays the intentional properties. If intentionality is as widespread as we contend, then interpretive questions arise in all forms of discourse. This opens the possibility of undermining, or overcoming, the conventional explanatory divisions between the natural and social sciences so that all sciences can be recognised as ‘social’ sciences, and in this sense as intentional.
Theme: Methods, Science and Models
Panel 4.
Jan Balon, Ph.D.
Department of Sociology
Charles University
Prague, Czech Republic
Reflections on Method in Interwar American Sociology
The paper provides a historical contextualization of the debates on theory and method within interwar American sociology. This period is often portrayed as the “golden” age of empirical inquiry resulting in proliferation of methodological orientations. Narrowly delineated issues of empirical research could profile particular “scientific” methods, but the suppression of the “general” theoretical dimension in favour of “concrete” research deepened uncertainty about the intellectual integrity of the profession as a whole. It is argued that the demands of professionalization and specialization within the discipline produced a research model which succeeded in analyzing specific issues, but failed to find (in the context of the “crisis” and “disruption” of American society) a convincing answer to the general question of the logic of society’s development.
Keywords: theory; method; interdisciplinary interaction; fragmentation; crisis
Jim Doran
Emeritus Professor
University of Essex
Colchester, UK
Using Agent-Based Modelling to Assess Ways of Life and their Social Impact
Agent-based modelling (ABM) on a computer is a scientific tool that has been developed over the past two decades. It provides a means to explore the precise implications of precise assumptions about individual behaviour and to discover their impact upon social processes, and has been applied in a wide range of contexts ranging from the spread of rumours, to land management policy, to road traffic organisation in Moscow, to the study of guerrilla wars. An easily accessible source of information about ABM is the free online Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation.
An important feature of agent-based modelling is that individuals within the computational model are represented using the techniques of artificial intelligence studies and therefore can possess limited but significant (pseudo-)cognitive abilities.
It is widely accepted that ABM has the potential to inform policy decision making. In this talk, however, I shall examine whether ABM can further illumine the relationship between the adoption by individuals of particular standards and styles of life, and the social formations and processes that may arise in consequence of significant numbers of individuals so doing. I shall refer particularly to the potential social impact of the teachings of Confucius as recorded in the Analects, and those of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the (canonical and non-canonical) Gospels. An important factor is the impact of the pre-existent social context in which teachings are promulgated.
Key technical issues are the amount of detail that can and must be incorporated in such a simulation model for it to be informative, in particular the degree of complexity associated with modelling of individuals, and the strategy for validation of the model as a whole – that is, what might convince us that such a model was providing trustworthy insights.
Melvin W Barber, Ph.D. Flagler College
Building Science and Sociology through the Description of Mechanisms Found in the Natural World
This paper addresses the respective roles of theory, models, and experiment in the cumulative development of scientific research. It outlines the chief characteristics of basic theory (the description of mechanisms) and how such theories are applied in scientific and sociological research. The basic theory of society (a description of the primary mechanism of sociology) is used in the development of theoretical models explaining social phenomena and in the design of experiments in sociology; the basic theories of society utilizing dynamic theory.
Throughout the discussion, evolutionary theory is utilized as a method of integrating succeeding theories of society. The paper concludes that the application of basic theories must make predictions that can be examined by experimental research.
Theme: Classical & contemporary theory: working with our inheritance
Panel 5
Prof. Dr. Hans-Peter Muller
Lehrstuhl fur Allgemeine Soziologie
Institut fur Sozialwissenschaften
Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin
Studying Styles of Life. Form and Conduct of Life in the classical theories of Georg Simmel and Max Weber
This paper reconstructs Simmel’s and Weber’s study of life-styles in order to answer the following questions: 1. How do the two German classics relate social and individual life? 2. What are the theoretical traits of their approaches? 3. Which methods do they apply in order to arrive at their analysis of the style of life? 4. What can be learned from these approaches for studying the life-styles of today?
Ever since its very beginnings, sociology has sought to find out how social life shapes individual lives. Emile Durkheim defined this discipline accordingly as “la science de la vie sociale”. In Germany, it was Georg Simmel and Max Weber who conceived of sociology as a “Kulturwissenschaft” or cultural science which by studying the forms and Gestalt of social life discover the frame of and the embeddedness for the individual styles of life. In early German sociology, the notion of “life” indicates this holistic search for the totality of social and individual life under modern conditions. It was Karl Marx whose politico-economic paradigm set the scene: ‘Since the way people produce, the way they are’ it is tantamount to study ways of production and their relationship to ways of life. This base-superstructure-model did not appeal to classical German sociology. Georg Simmel sought to analyze the structure and culture of social life in order to find out what this frame of fragmented modernity means for the individual style of life. Simmel’s “Philosophy of Money” is the counter-model to Karl Marx’s “Capital” which by elucidating the economic and social structures of modern society seeks to answer the question how the modern style of life looks like. The famous sixth chapter lays out an abstract frame for the modern condition. The later Simmel then tried to spell out the totality of modern being by integrating his structural and cultural sociology into a philosophy of life. Typical for “Lebensphilosophie” is the attempt to relate “Lebensanschauung” and “Weltanschauung”, “Lebensstil” and “Weltbild”. In the footsteps of Simmel we find Max Scheler’s analysis of “world-views” and Eduard Spranger’s study of “forms of life” – not to mention Heidegger’s “philosophy of existence”.
Max Weber took another avenue for studying the relationship between social and individual life. Instead of contemplating on modern culture and its abstract forms in general like Simmel, he started from modern religion and its impact on the conduct of life. Ascetic Protestantism in general, and Puritanism in particular prompt a methodical-rational conduct of life which is conducive to the rise of capitalism. Once established, modern capitalism plus modern state and bureaucracy, modern science and modern law establish this way of life on a societal if not world-wide scale. His famous prognosis: ‘We all have to become Puritans’! Since then, the rationalization of social and individual life has gone on in order to introduce “efficiency” into every domain of life.
Harry F. Dahms
Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies,
Department of Sociology
Assistant Director, Center for the Study of Social Justice
University of Tennessee;
Editor, Current Perspectives in Social Theory
Classical Sociology and the Dynamics of Alienation, Anomie, and the Protestant Ethic: Theorizing Modern Society as Artifice
The classics of social theory (esp. Marx, Durkheim, Weber) endeavored to engender a mode of analysis designed to illuminate how modern societies, as a whole, and in their component dimensions, resulted from and are sustained by a set of ongoing dynamic processes. These processes cannot be gleaned directly from the surface manifestations of societal conditions (institutions, associations, social classes, forms of social, political, and economic organization, norms and values, and types of power and control). Rather, it was necessary to develop tools designed specifically to enable social scientists to recognize and scrutinize rigorously those dynamic processes, in order to illuminate their counterintuitive nature. The classics of social theory, and in Durkheim and Weber, two key founders of sociology, conceived of the discipline as the means par excellence for revealing, in a systematic and consistent manner, how modern society is, in fact, an artifice. Specifically, the formation of modern society was contingent on the progressive separation of perceptions of reality from the material foundations of human existence, in myriad ways—from the individual to humanity. Potentially, this process of separation will continue, as Max Weber put it, “until the day that the last ton of fossil fuel has been consumed.” In the writings of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, the three concepts their names have been associated with most directly—alienation, anomie, and the Protestant ethic—highlight their concern, respectively, with modes of deepening separation that are tied directly to the dynamic processes which sustain modern societies. Modern society, then, appears as a form of social organization that maintains social order and shapes institutions and organizations in ways that are not compatible with the kind of assumptions about the realities of the modern world that are at the core of everyday life assumptions and perspectives, and without which—in turn—neither social order nor the de facto functioning of institutions and organizations would be possible. Yet, while alienation, anomie, and the Protestant ethic play comparable roles in the writings of the three classics, respectively, the dynamic processes involve important qualitative differences. Together the three processes produce a reciprocally reinforcing feedback loop that is highly complementary. Both alienation and anomie entail a growing destructive potential, both with regard to society and its members, and via technology and economic development, to reality itself. In order for modern societies not to fall apart, an adhesive was required that insured that the “artifice” will retain its integrity. In short, the Protestant ethic took the place of eroding common morality and traditional ethics, and was internalized ever more deeply through processes of socialization, from generation to generation. Professional sociologists tended to interpret alienation, anomie, and the Protestant ethic as inherently static tools, but their purpose was to advance the development of theoretical frameworks intended to capture the dynamic nature of modern societies.
Theme: Foucault
Panel 6
Dr. Evangelia Sembou
Convenor, Political Thought Specialist Group of the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom
Foucault’s Genealogy
‘Method’ is usually a ‘means’ towards an ‘end’ (a ‘way’). As such, method stands midway of an assumption/hypothesis and an end. For example, one may start with the hypothesis that there is an increasing tendency for individuals to commit suicide in modern societies and that individual decisions to give an end to one’s life are affected by the different forms of social solidarity in different societies. One would then need a ‘method’ whereby to test the above hypothesis. Accordingly, one may proceed by using and analyzing the suicide statistics of different societies. The goal would then be to identify different types of suicide. These turn out to be four; namely, “egotistic”, “anomic”, “altruistic” and “fatalistic” suicides (E. Durkheim, Suicide). Can genealogy operate in the same way? This paper will discuss what Foucauldian genealogy consists in, while showing Foucault’s debt to Nietzsche. A simple definition of Foucauldian genealogy would be that it is a type of history. However, it is a specific type of history. Foucault’s genealogical history seeks to deconstruct what was previously regarded as unified (i.e. history as a chronological pattern of events emanating from a mystified but all-determining point of departure), while also attempting to identify an underlying continuity which is the product of “discontinuous systematicities” (OD,[1] p. 69). Moreover, in contrast to the Hegelian and Marxist philosophies of history, ‘genealogy’ is not an holistic project but a perspectival enterprise. Foucauldian genealogy is an history of tracing ‘origins’ and, as such, it questions the idea of origins or deeper meanings. It unearths the force relations operating in particular events and historical developments. Foucault describes his genealogy as an “effective history” (NGH,[2] pp. 87-90). Foucauldian genealogy debunks the assumption underlying conventional historiography that there are ‘facts’ to be interpreted; rather, facts are themselves constructed out of the researcher’s ‘will to truth’. Furthermore, Foucauldian genealogy shows how ‘subjects’ are constituted in discourses (Discipline and Punish; The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1). The paper will also discuss Foucault’s “analytics”[3] of power and the extent to which genealogy is a critique.
Dr. Jonathan Short, York University, Toronto, Canada
Paradigm and Profanation: On the Strategic Ends of Method
There is little question that Foucault’s methodological approaches to contemporary phenomena have become a mainstay of current social theory: not only the substance of Foucault’s concerns, which cannot be divorced entirely from his methods, but also the philosophical assumptions of those methods themselves, supply the underpinning for much research in contemporary social and sociological theorizing. If one might on this basis claim that Foucault’s methods have become a “working orthodoxy” for many social theorists, it stands to reason that the work of Agamben appears to many strands of social theorizing not only heretical, but with its seeming return to large-scale historical continuities, methodologically retrograde, as the illicit return to grand narrative. In this paper I seek to challenge this view by turning to Agamben’s recent discussions of method where he claims to faithfully appropriate the methodology of Foucault. By focusing on the methodological notion of the “paradigm” and the “apparatus”, Agamben not only undercuts the opposition between continuity and discontinuity, but he also provides an insightfully synthetic reading of Foucault across the different methodological phases of the latter’s career. But this examination of Agamben reveals not so much a dedicated follower of Foucault as the apprentice of a methodology derived some time ago from Warburg and Benjamin. That method turns out to be intimately bound up with many of Agamben’s terms such as “inoperativity”, “deactivation”, and “profanation”, terms which turn out to have a reflexive methodological aspect. Method for Agamben (as also for Foucault), cannot be a matter of representing a disinterested truth. Yet unlike the permanence of Foucault’s tactical battles, Agamben substitutes ongoing creativity which puts the ruins of the past to new uses. It is perhaps in this light that we can reassess Agamben’s claims to finality beyond the fray of politics.
Theme: General theory
Panel 7
Clint Jones
Department of Philosophy, University of Kentucky
The Problem of Rationality in Rawls:A Breakdown of Methodology Behind the Veil of Ignorance
Since the publication of A Theory of Justice John Rawls’ proposal of “justice as fairness” has been ever-present in social and political discourse and, in spite of critiques on many philosophical fronts, continues to be the methodological star around which social theories orbit. Any coherent attempt to explain this phenomenon would inevitably begin with the attractiveness of the “original position” and the “veil of ignorance” which are the two basic operating principles that drive Rawls’ overall theory. However uncontroversial and easy to understand these ideas are when taken by themselves they can be very problematic when considered in the greater scheme of justice as fairness. While most challenges to Rawls focus on reasonability and applicability on the greater level, I would propose that the system fails at the level of methodology precisely because of problems inherent in the original position, namely, the reliance on reason as a decision making tool behind the veil of ignorance.
The problem of rationality in the original position behind the veil of ignorance is that it is a prerequisite for decision making according to the two principles of justice. This is problematic because 1) rationality is dependent on developmental conditions on internal and external experiences that Rawls wants to banish from the original position and 2) rational discourse is predicated on a social superstructure that allows for and fosters the possibility of rational discourse. This entails that the original position requires at least an understanding of the social structure preferable to the discourse necessary to discuss and adopt the principles of justice. However, this is only possible if the people in the original position are not devoid of personal knowledge of their social self. If these problems exist then Rawls’ broader project will ultimately fail and require substantial revision to be methodologically applicable and relevant to struggles for social justice if justice as fairness is going to be meaningful.
Theme: Text and Technique
PANEL 8
Tomáš Dvořák
Institute of Philosophy
Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic
Technologies of Academic Writing
In interviews, autobiographies and memoirs, as well as in archives of manuscripts and miscellanea, one can often find academics reflecting upon the specific ways of conceiving, researching, preparing and writing their works, upon the procedures and activities, which usually rest hidden beneath the polished up and finalized texts.
Niklas Luhmann, who would go as far as to claim “I only think with my index card system,” is a notorious case in point. His index card system was not thematically organized but consisted of chains of numbered cards pertaining to and developing a particular Theme: as well as ramifying into other related topics. One card could refer to another simply by having its number written on it. Luhmann managed to develop his system for over 40 years and to create a kind of a secondary memory and a communication partner used in preparation of all of his numerous works. Since his system has no preconceived order, it makes the emergence of new meaningful linkages, clusters and structures possible. It also reflects the structure of society (or Luhmann’s vision of society), which is not hierarchical but rather divided into multiple and independent subsystems.
The complexity of Luhmann’s thought (which he himself described as “labyrinth-like” and “non-linear”) owes much to this method of recording, arranging and developing ideas, which has also proven itself to be a prolific writing machine, producing over 70 books and nearly 400 articles on a wide variety of topics.
Drafting and sketching ideas, excerpting quotes from other authors or summarizing their arguments, drawing maps and diagrams of concepts and problems – whether with a pen and paper or with some sophisticated computer program – these are preliminary procedures one does before writing a paper or a book. In published texts, a more or less linear arrangement is superimposed over these techniques. They, however, contribute essentially to the formation of knowledge: material practices of writing influence conceptual architectures of texts and lead to significant differences in their meanings. Idiosyncrasies in writing practices can be linked to styles of thinking, methods of reasoning and forms of textual expression.
Malgorzata Burnecka, PhD.
Institute of Sociology
University of Wroclaw, Poland
Meaning as the key concept. The perspective of social systems theory
The paper is designed as an introduction to the concept of meaning from the perspective of Niklas Luhmann's autopoietic social systems theory, as well as an analysis of the consequences of such theoretical approach for social sciences. The investigations are focused on three main questions. Firstly, why the concept of meaning (Sinn) became most significant in Luhmann's construction of the sociological theory? Secondly, what new research possibilities may this concept propose or what changes may it cause on different levels of sociological analysis? Finally, what kinds of limitations may we discover while using the concept of meaning as primal theoretical tool in social sciences? As a conclusion, the paper situates Luhmann's perspective with the concept of meaning embedded among other leading contemporary theoretical approaches in order to grasp crucial differences and to point out the elements they have in common.
Theme: PhDs Work in Progress (3 panels)
Panel 9
Julian Davis, School of Sociology and Philosophy, UCC
Will and Method in the Social Sciences
The paper indicates a number of social sciences authors for whom the human will presents a central problem in attempts to understand how things are. The paper begins with a look at Plato and his concern with the nefarious effects of the libido dominandi, and continues by outlining how this concern has played a role in the work of two Platonic thinkers, Gregory Bateson and Jan Patočka. For all three men, the will produces obstacles for both knowing and living, and careful reflection on ourselves is required if we are to speak truthfully about the world. The paper then turns to Max Weber and suggests that for him the will is the defining characteristic of the West. Weber’s “Science as a Vocation” lecture can be taken as his most important statement on the place of the will in science but can also be used to make sense of other central parts of his work. The paper concludes by arguing that Weber’s outlining of an ethic, or method, for the scientist shows parallels with the Platonic idea of the “care of the self”.
Penelope Boyer, PhD. candidate, European Graduate School (EGS), Saas-Fee, Switzerland
The Gyneaceum: Social Theory & Female [Homo]Sexuality Extended into the Archaic Age, or, Against Athen-o-centrism
Working with the Greeks today, it is reprehensible not to reach further into the past than Classical Athens, into the pre-Socratic, pre-Platonic, Archaic Age around which much has now much has been written—especially with regard to women. But opportunities have still not been taken to stitch the significance of these social theories together—especially as regards sexuality. Applying assemblage theory and Manuel de Landa’s ‘new philosophy of society’ to material culture and revisionist epic evidence of the Archaic era, a deterritorialized research is revealed.
A body of infamous but now nearly neglected literature led by likes of J.J. Bachofen, Robert Briffault, Mathilde and Mathias Vaerting, Robert Graves, Erich Neumann, E.O. James through to Martin Bernal and Marija Gambusta recognize women as the earliest hunters, fishers, warriors, potters, builders, traders, medicinal administers and surgeons. With the vessel lying at the core of archaic Mediterranean women’s character, the mysteries of transformation, preservation and nourishment are symbolized by the cave—her shelter, storeroom, temple—places always of her domain become the pen and dolmen, sacred locations of birth and burial. The earliest Mesopotamian houses were made of mats propped up with pillars. Weaving was architectural first (fence, wall, mat); garments followed.
Consider the loom, histos in Greek: A contraption even in its earliest incarnations capable of being a construct larger than the largest animal known by an insular island community. This centerpiece of Aegean activity, prosthesis to near half the population, is poised for new consideration in this our current era of mobile social net-working and fingers forever texting. Much of the other half of the population was tied to another histos, the mast of a ship. One histos for fixedness, another for flight. Both are woodworked frames for cloth—textile-to-be and finished taut sail. Each represents a world—infinite globe and finite gyneaceum.
Consider too the gyneaceum. A world of women only. In misogynist Classical Athens, the gyneacuem was banishment. In Archaic arcadia, it was a place of privilege, productivity, prowess above and away from the shit-covered courtyard. What went on there, really? Daily? Fingers forever fluttering, shuttles flying. Take the epic Homeric women’s quarters of kissing cousins Clytemnestra, Helen, and Penelope--led by these Spartan-raised females, accustomed to single-sex love as young athletic maidens before marriage. This is the transparent condition of the gyneaceum at the House of Atreus, at that of Helen of Troy and at Odysseus’ oikos. These worlds anticipate (by only a century or so) Sappho’s 6th century BCE thiasoi, her school for girls, which was one among many on Lesbos as elsewhere in the Mediterranean then.
The link between loom and love is illustrious throughout Greek mythology, most often illustrated with a freakish feminist streak. Philomel’s rape and subsequently severed tongue lead her to weave her tale into a tapestry to tell her sister Procne what happened; jealous Athena turns the allegedly finer weaver Arachne into a spider having slashed her face; Dionysus’ wife Ariadne possesses the thread that leads Theseus to the center of the labyrinth and out again; the “Moirae” or Fates control Destiny by spinning the life’s thread on the distaff.
Filaments of lesbianism linger. How is homosexuality identified in an Archaic Age when most scholars start with Foucault who himself does not delve any earlier than the Classical Age of Athens? For Foucault, female practices mattered little anyway. But why the Athenocentrism always still? Surely we must, as scholars/social theorists, be/go beyond this to discover the day to day of days before our boys Plato and Socrates.
Natalie Delimata, IT Sligo.
Developmental Systems Theory: A Methodology for Intersex Gender Authentication
Ten years ago Ann Fausto-Sterling forwarded Developmental Systems Theory (henceforth DST) as a methodological lens to reconcile the nature / nurture debate (Fausto-Sterling 2000). Both the nature and nurture arguments forwarded theories advocating the dominance of one of these set of factors over the other generating a dichotomy. DST, by developing a multi-dimensional understanding of the life cycle, collapses the nature/nurture dichotomy in such a way as to form a qualitatively different ontology of the organism. DST is not a teleological theory of development where the organism is viewed as the unfurling of a pre-determined set of characteristics nor is it a quantitative integration of nature and nurture with a particular characteristic being described as 80% genetic and 20% social. DST recognises a more discursive understanding of the organism, where genetic, epigenetic, environmental, social and historical factors continuously inform each other in a constant cycle of contingency. There is no developmental beginning or end, no inside or outside, just constant exchange (Oyama et al. 2001; Jablonka et al. 2005).
Since DST incorporates genetic, epigenetic, environmental and social factors within its epistemology, a deep understanding of every field within DST would be impractical. This paper is proposing that a conceptual appreciation of DST’s ‘big picture’ would provide a common theoretical framework and methodological lens allowing academics and practitioners from diverse disciplines to work together to explore particular issues.
The issue at the centre of this research is the discursive discontinuity facing clinicians’ treating intersex in Ireland. While describing their patients from the medical perspective regarding their constituent biological parts, clinicians appear confident and matter of fact; however, as they view the same patient through the broader cultural lens they become deeply concerned as they confront the cultural unintelligibility of the identity they have just articulated. This concern relates directly to how to disclose this information to their patient and the anticipated psychosocial implications of such a diagnosis.
The aim of this paper is to critically evaluate DST as a methodological lens which produces alternative methods of understanding sex and authenticating gender by providing a new paradigmatic understanding of the lived experience. This paper will look specifically at the methodological utility of DST to the process of diagnosis and disclosure in relation to ‘intersex’.
Peter J. Kearney
Department of Paediatrics and Child Health /School of Sociology and Philosophy, University College Cork.
Salutogenesis: the growth and development of wellbeing (abridged)
The Salutogenic Frame
Salutogenesis is a term introduced by Antonovsky to suggest a quest for the good life through experiences of coherence. He introduced the term in order to understand his research findings that 30% of female survivors of Nazi concentration camps had a good life despite terrible experiences. He conceived salutogenesis as a proactive process of meaningful engagement with the world, which promotes a holistic sense of coherence even in the face of unspeakable suffering. The etymology of salud contains an element of celebrating life similar to the traditional Irish toast for good health – sláinte. Saluto also contains an element of respectful recognition to a greater power as in salute. Antonovsky wanted to redirect health promotion research towards a focus on people’s resources and their capacity to create health rather than the classic personal and public health focus on the prevention of risk, ill health and disease (Lindsröm and Eriksson, 2005). He did not dismiss the effects of pathogenesis and the consequent need for the correction of deficits and the treatments of dis-ease; but suggested that it was more important to seek health-ease through a meaningful appraisal of present circumstances that could lead to a better understanding and management of problems (Antonovsky, 1995). The process of understanding the situation and accepting challenges as meaningful could prompt active management of resources. He suggests that the intertwining of comprehensibility, meaningfulness and manageability can lead to a sense of coherence (SOC) that orientates engagement with life. Antonovsky used the phrase generalised resistance resources (GRR) to embrace personal, social and cultural factors that enhance the development of a SOC in a lifetime. A high SOC actively engages life, whilst respecting limits to our capacity for cosmogenesis – our horizon of experience. Thus salutogenesis in keeping with the etymology is a way of celebrating a meaningful life balanced by recognition of our limited ability to reduce uncertainty.
In the Faculty of Medicine the problems of pathogenic disease are solved in an orderly way through eliciting symptoms and signs, interpreting these with the aid of biological samples and images, arriving at a diagnosis and prescribing appropriate therapies. It is a reactive process that combats agencies of dis-ease. Pathogenesis and salutogenesis are competitive processes in the domain of health and their postures of defensive reactivity and proactive creativity are different. It is a question of the correct balance: salutogenesis should dominate unless there are natural pathologies, when a medical corrective is appropriate. The pathogenic attitude should be subordinate to a salutogenic approach to life. Baron Munchausen’s problem was pathological fictions in order to get attention; whereas Doctor Pangloss responded to genuine pathology with the hot air of excessive optimism. They are both social pathologies that are beyond the salutogenic frame. The power of modern medicine has tended to encourage a pathogenic attitude to life as science seems to have all the answers. The temptation is to succumb to this oracle and yield to a perpetual utopian yearning. The art of medicine has to continuously redeploy fresh assessments in the face of the latest scientific knowledge, but the assessments describe limits as well as advances. The pathogenic response should be temporary even in the case of chronic disorders. A predominantly salutogenic orientation associates with a high SOC, whereas a mainly pathogenic attitude has a diminished SOC. The salutogenic or pathogenic approach to life’s challenges can flip-flop in a way that is a convincing explanation for sudden turnabouts in a person’s life. Pauline conversions, falling in love and epiphanic moments of revelation all suggest a sudden realignment of attitudes that requires a theory that will accommodate complete and abrupt changes in personal orientation to the self and the world.
Panel 10
Blake Heller
London School Of Economics And Political Science
MSc Economics And Philosophy
The Rawlsian Agent in a Hobbesian World:
An Exploration of Effective Constraints on the Social Contract
Rawls’s treatise on justice, A Theory of Justice, represents arguably the most important, and certainly the most economically influential, developments in twentieth century contractarian literature. Tracing the roots of Rawls’s political doctrine inevitably leads to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. Analyzing Rawls’s and Hobbes’s remarkable contributions to political philosophy, and more specifically, social contract theory, reveals an important sense in which both philosophers can be understood as undertaking the same task: to develop the institutional structure and reasonable limits of an ideal practicable government given the constraints of their historical perspective and social context.
Just as Buchanan (1976) outlines credible circumstances under which Rawlsian principles would emerge from something like the State of Nature, we can imagine similarly credible circumstances under which preferences for an effective Sovereign like that of the Hobbesian Leviathan might emerge from the Rawlsian original position. No particular characterization of the impartial agent’s considered preferences for the basic structure of society holds unequivocally, which is something Rawls was acutely aware of in outlining his “circumstances of justice.”[1] However, examining the historical context of each work, as well as the social, natural, and technological constraints of each philosopher’s society, we can imagine either as a rational agent’s perceived limit of a practically utopian social structure. The advances that have made possible the conceptual leap from Leviathan toJustice as Fairness are indicative of the truth behind Rawls’s belief that “[…]the limits of the possible are not given by the actual, for we can to a greater or lesser extent change political and social institutions, and much else.”[2]
[pic]
[1] Rawls, 2001, pp. 84.
[2] Ibid, pp. 5.
Dhruv Jain
Social and Political Thought, York University
The Great Outdoors: Quentin Meillassoux and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Alain Badiou’s radical and controversial thesis that “insofar as being, qua being, is nothing other than pure multiplicity, it is legitimate to say that ontology, the science of being qua being, is nothing other than mathematics itself”[4] has ushered in a new body of philosophical work that has attempted to re-conceptualize the relationship between philosophy and mathematics itself, and investigate the capacity of mathematical formalism to address and/or inform us about the nature of Being. Quentin Meillassoux with the publication of After Finitude, has radically extended Badiou’s own already radical thesis and has sought to challenge the very grounds of post-Kantian philosophy i.e. that the sensible is but a relation between the thing and I and thus renders the world in-itself unknowable – otherwise known as correlationism[5]. Meillassoux refuses to be like other “contemporary philosophers” who have “lost the great outdoors, the absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers: that outside which is not relative to us, and which was given as indifferent to its own givenness to be what it is existing in itself regardless of whether we are thinking of it or not.”[6] Meillasoux instead provocatively argues that, “all those aspects of the object that can be formulated in mathematical terms can be meaningfully conceived as properties of the object in itself”[7]. Indeed, mathematics is no longer simply capable of expressing being inasmuch that being is multiplicity, but is now capable of knowing the world in-itself i.e. absolute knowledge. This paper will seek to determine whether Meillassoux is indeed capable of advancing the above thesis and thus successfully challenge the strict correlationist position that such knowledge is always knowledge for us. I will follow this radical claim through a reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s strict correlationist critique of this very thesis in the first chapter of The Visible and the Invisible.
Christoforos Bouzanis
University of Edinburgh
Reflexive versus reflective knowledge: from the concept of social ontology towards the need for an internal criterion of its epistemic status.
Ernest Sosa (2001, 2009) has distinguished between animal and reflective knowledge in the sense that for the latter – and unlike for the former – the knowing subject should not only use a source of beliefs, but also provide an epistemological account for the reliability of this source. Additionally, for knowledge to be reflective, Sosa requires that this epistemological account coheres with the subject’s understanding both of why this source is indeed reliable and, of the way in which she is related to her object.
However, this last requirement implies that one already has a preconception about the subject-object relationships in such a process of reflective theorizing – a preconception which is ontological rather than epistemological. Yet, on the subject-object relationships, Andrew Sayer has explained that in social scientific theorizing the knowing subject is part of her object (Sayer, 1992) and, as a result, the scientist’s understanding of her object (together with her beliefs about which source is reliably truth-conductive) can influence and be influenced by the object of investigation itself.
This paper aims to argue that the ontological presupposition that the objectifying subject is part of his object of investigation does not require merely reflective but reflexive theorizing. For now, ontological presuppositions, in their interrelations, should not only cohere with the subject’s beliefs about the kind of objectification – like in Sosa’s reflective knowledge – but also with their account of the knowing subject’s possibility to cognitively stand within that very object, that is society.
Amelia Howard
PhD Candidate, University of Waterloo
The Proverbial Fence and the Problem of the Neighbour: A Radical Interpretive Analysis
This paper is an analysis of the proverb “good fences make good neighbours.” I resist treating the saying as one that needs to be proven or disproven. That is to say, I am not interested in discovering the ways in which a fence might help or hinder ones relationship with his or her neighbour. Rather, following Blum (2003, 193) I treat the saying as “the surface of an implicit discourse in relation to a problem which remains to be explored.” In other words “good fences make good neighbours” references a conversation about the relation of boundaries to neighbourliness, and offers the theorist a chance to orient to an idea of mediation in a stronger sense than mere separation. I approach this analysis from a radical interpretive (Bonner, 1997) or self-reflective perspective, which calls upon the theorist to treat what mediates any discourse as the object of analysis. The fence, imaginary or real, as the mediator in the neighbour relation presents the theorist with an opportunity to examine the question of how we might orient to such a dependence in a way that can be called “good.” That is, if the “good neighbour” is made by the “good fence,” anyone with an interest in good neighbourly relations should be concerned with a formulation of a good fence. Broadly speaking, an attempt to formulate the “good fence” relies on the question of goodness in general and its place as a fundamental question in any kind of theoretical endeavour. Further, the paper should be seen as a demonstration of and argument for the radical interpretive method of sociological theorizing.
Key words:
Interpretive theory, Blum & McHugh, hermeneutics, self-reflection, Radical Interpretive Sociology, the neighbour
Greg Bird.
PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology, York University, Canada
Contemporary Existentialism, Social Theory & Community
The recent continental debate about community challenges us to reconsider how
community has been conceptualized in western social theory. This presentation
shall examine one aspect of this literature: the pathway towards community.
Within this literature, the theorists do not attempt to develop a methodology
that uncovers or discovers community, as if it pre-existed, but to theorize a
method that is itself so disruptive that it opens up the possibility of
communal relationships. I shall demonstrate how the pathway towards community
follows (metá) from the way (hodús), i.e. method, we disrupt commonplace ways
of thinking and engaging with each other. For thinkers like Giorgio Agamben
(1994), Maurice Blanchot (1988), Roberto Esposito (2010), and Jean-Luc Nancy
(1991, 2000), we are pressed to think about community as the very relationships
that occur through an absolute disruption. For each theorist, community is so
exceptional that it can neither be anticipated through prescriptive techniques
like political platforms and programs, nor can it be identified through
pre-established systems of understanding and traditional ways of thinking. For
each, community is merely the relationships that occur in the very event of
disruption. This is not a minor disruption, but an event in absolute terms. It
also re-raises the problem of methodology in phenomenological existentialism:
How can we theorize the event of existence as a phenomenon without
circumscribing this event and thereby annulling its phenomenal aspects? That
is, how can it be thought about without predetermining that which it is
supposed to open unto?
This presentation shall focus on the Heideggerian strains in this body of
literature. I shall begin by outlining what I call Heidegger’s “transversal
method”, which he employs in his lecture on “The Principle of Identity” (2002).
I shall briefly examine how Heidegger’s transversal method works by cutting
through (trans) and turning (vertere) the traditional reduction of
relationships to the identity-difference dichotomy. The event of existence is
supposed to open us up to being in a proper relationship, which for him is the
ontological relationship. In the second part of this presentation, I shall
demonstrate how Nancy draws from this transversal method and uses it to think
about community in terms of the disruptive event. For Nancy, being-in-common
occurs through division and sharing (partagé), which cannot be reduced to
either identity or difference. I shall argue that for Nancy, and to a lesser
extent Agamben and Esposito, the exigency of community is tied up with the
twentieth century problem of existence. I shall conclude this presentation by
arguing that this new body of literature challenges the orthodox ways of
thinking about community that are found in such literatures as the debate
between cosmopolitans and communitarians or classical Marxist theories of
communism.
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Panel 11
Heidi Bickis
PhD Candidate
Department of Sociology
University of Alberta
Encounters with art as a method of theorizing: Thinking-with Guillermo
Kuitca's paper and lined stages
This paper draws from my dissertation research in which I explore how encountering and attending to the distinct “knowledges” of a work of art might compel social theory to ask after its own methods and attend to the social through a different lens. With this focus, I engage with recent scholarship in social and cultural theory, art history and philosophy that aims to rethink the relationship between theorist/critic and art object. Working against the dominant “theories of art” model, many scholars are not only addressing art's “equal knowledges” (Harrington 2004), but are exploring how these knowledges challengeexisting theoretical paradigms (Bennett 2005, Diken and Lausten 2008, Ellsworth 2005, Lyotard 2009, Rogoff 2006). Building on this work, I seek to enact a practice of social theory that thinks and writes with an artwork, a method of theorizing that extends to an “outside” or “other”. Following Diken and Lausten (2008), I wish to “tarry with the question of how sociology itself [and social thought more broadly] can become different through its confrontation with [art]” (p. 5).
My purpose with this paper is to explore the proposed method of theorizing by engaging with a series of works by Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca. In his Theatre Collages (2005) Kuitca works with paper, oil stick and graphite lines to recreate floor plans of well-known auditoriums (e.g. Covent Garden). These large scale works place the viewer on the stage and in this way, raise questions about spectatorship and the relations between seeing and being seen, questions that also speak to the work of theorizing. My interest is in
the unique materialities of the artwork, namely, the lines and marks of the paper, graphite and oil and how these aspects of Kuitca's collage-drawings direct the work of seeing, and by extension, theorizing (theoria) towards new and unfamiliar territories. By thinking with the materialities of the artworks, I consider how the work of art speaks back to the work of theory. To explore such a method, I will focus on a re-encounter with my notes taken during a visit to a Kuitca exhibit at the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis, MN in July 2010. By working through these writings, I ask: What kind of seeing does Kuitca's art ask of the viewer? How do the lines and marks shape this asking and in what ways do they implicate the viewer? And how might an attention to these specificities of the artwork offer a
method for theorizing these very questions? With the focus on Kuitca's lines and the kind of seeing they invite, I explore how a theoretical practice might unlearn its methods by opening itself up to objects and practices that supposedly lie outside its given parameters.
Brice Nixon
School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Colorado at Boulder
Reuniting the Mental and the Material in Marxist Theory:The Culture Industry, the Audience Commodity, the Dialectic, and Social Change
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s culture industry thesis and Dallas Smythe’s theory of the audience commodity represent the two sides of a theoretical split within Marxist theory that needs to be overcome if such theory is to provide support for movements for social change. Each position represents a method for theorizing the problem of commodification in media and culture. This split has detrimental implications for social change because each theory produces a different, ultimately non-dialectical, theory of social change. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the status quo is reproduced by the commodification of thought: The critical thought enabled by non-commodified culture is replaced by thought as a commodity produced by the culture industry for the purpose of mass deception. That suggests the goal for social change should be in the realm of ‘the mental’ by opening up a space for critical thinking by de-commodifying thought. For Smythe, the status quo is reproduced by the commodification of time: The free time spent away from the job is replaced by labor time as a commodity produced by advertising for the purpose of managing the demand for commodities. That suggests the goal for social change should be in the realm of ‘the material’ through the creation of actual leisure time by de-commodifying media consumption time. Efforts for social change that proceed from either position will fail to address all aspects of the problem of the commodification of media and culture. A more complete and productive theoretical foundation for social change is necessary. The revised method for theorizing the commodification of media and culture must proceed by conceptualizing the relationship between ‘the mental’ and ‘the material’ as a dialectical relationship within the social totality. The work of Raymond Williams and Jean-Paul Sartre provides the starting point for that revision.
Christopher McElligott
Graduate Education Programme in Social Sciences, University College Cork
The Shopping Mall: a consumer dreamworld for the constantly moving Happiness Machine.
In the course of my work I am seeking to identify methods of theorizing which can help us to understand and interpret our present practices in a particular type of space – the Shopping Mall. I have been exploring the Shopping Mall in my research for the past eight years. As I approach the final year of my PhD, my theoretical framework leads me propose a conception of the Shopping Mall as a consumer dreamworld full of what Edward Bernays (1928) referred to as ‘constantly moving happiness machines’ whose docile aim is to seek pleasure all the time. In November 2010, I moved my research into the fieldwork stage and implemented my research strategy on a particular site. I conducted fieldwork in a shopping mall in Downtown Toronto called The Eaton Centre. First opening in 1977, this is a significant downtown shopping mall which is undergoing a major physical transformation and revitalisation, where the reality created in the mall has been disturbed and uprooted. My research contrasts with other studies of the Mall that have been carried out, which focused mainly on consumption in these spaces (Holbrook, and Jackson, 1999) (Wrigley and Lowe, 1996).
My paper will not only be an output for some of the data I have collected, but also a discussion of why I have conducted a particular type of research. The aim of my research is to provide an insight into the reality which exists in the Shopping Mall. This approach is influenced by Walter Benjamin’s insights on the Arcades of Paris in his unfinished work – The Arcades Project. I will discuss challenges I have encountered in terms of finding a way of inquiry that is sustained and methodically pursued, and which will allow me to clarify the ideals which exist in this particular space. This is what I regard to be the most challenging aspect of my PhD research. The chance to present this paper at the International Social Theory Consortium will help me to progress further towards a method of theorising the reality which exists in the contemporary shopping mall.
Kieran O’Connor
School of Sociology and Philosophy, UCC
THE RESONANCE OF AMBIGUOUS IRISH UNITY AND AN ACCELLERATED, NON REFLEXIVE MODERNITY THROUGH THE INCORPORATION OF INSTITUTIONAL INTERESTS.
What I am attempting to address is the perception that there appear to be uncontested presumptions of unity both in the manner of engagement between institutional bodies, and in moral and ethical debate over the conduct of public life in general in Ireland. This analysis is specifically meant to be in relation to the normative expectations that govern the constitution of the liberal democracy which are, at their core, defined by commitment to public examination of issues of universal interest. I am proposing an analysis of the construction and presentation of some core issues of universal public interest in Ireland since the inception of public partnership, and the possibility for, and nature of, public response. I hope also to compliment this by displaying the effects of this upon evolution and adaptation of political agency in this period of social partnership, namely 1987 to the present.
I am suggesting that the nature and application of the social partnership model in Ireland, and its relationship to the “Ireland Inc.” response to the contemporaneously globalising ideology of the free-market have had a particular resonance in Irish society which is demonstrable. This further suggests a capacity for undoubtedly pragmatic, yet rather short term responses to public issues. However, this has only been achieved through increasing suspension of contingent positions and, ultimately, the suppression of public deliberation over key issues. Although the capacity to emphasise a concerted institutional approach to the global market can be advantageous, placing the emphasis on the economic administrative aspect of democratic governance has resulted in an accelerated, one dimensional Irish modernity. The result is systematic failure to engage with a plurality of possible or alternative approaches, issues, needs, future visions, desires and hence capacities in a rapidly transforming Ireland.
Session 12
Jerald Hage
University of Maryland.
For the past 50 years, I have been working on a general social theory about evolution and social change that would unite the disciplines of economics and sociology (I am still working on integrating political science as well). Since the conference is in part also on theory construction implicitly if not explicitly, I would indicate the errors in current theories that the new theory addresses:
1. macro theories are not sensitive enough to different pathways; (Tilly, Nisbet, et al.)
2. do not address failed evolution or various issues such as the collapse of the Soviet Union; (Collins)
3. do not provide an answer to the end of history assertion of Fukuyama;
4. do not explain complexity and differentiation (Alexander).
From the standpoint of theory construction any new paradigm should be evaluated on how many different intellectual and social problems it can solve:
1. integrate the fractious discipline of sociology (Turner);
2. provide a new policy model for sociologists so that they can get jobs;
3. integrate other social disciplines, primarily economics
4. up-date and synthesize the major social theories of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The specific proposal is that rather than a paper (this requires a book), I would present a point point presentation for an hour.
Theme: Methods of Theorizing and Literary Form
PANEL 13
Prof. Gad Yair
Chair, Department of Sociology & Anthropology
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Papal Lessons on German Social Theory:
The Persistence of Secularized Faustian Narratives of the Fall of Europe
In this paper I would argue that German social theory is theology in disguise. For two centuries it re-narrates the secularized theology of Faust while using it to interpret the reformation, the Enlightenment, modernity and the historical “fall” of Europe and Western civilization. To substantiate this proposition, this paper analyzes Benedict XVI’s oeuvre while exposing the meaningful affinity between his writings and critical traditions in German social theory. The analysis shows that the narrative through which Cardinal Ratzinger analyses the fall of modern Europe and its de-spiritualization expresses the same Faustian concerns that Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Heidegger, Spengler, and Adorno displayed in their own depiction of the evils of modernity – of capitalism, bureaucracy, money, cities, and popular culture. In that sense, Cardinal Ratzinger is a member of a German critical lineage, as he joins his predecessors in using the narrative of Faustian fall to criticize modernity and the pathology of reason. I expose this cultural infrastructure while positioning Ratzinger as a director of a neo-Faustian play, where Luther (qua Faust), the Enlightenment (Mephisto), and Europe are the main protagonists. This interpretation is used to support the following literary or rhetorical logic: (a) Benedict XVI is a theologian; (b) his writings tackle similar historical and social issues to those addressed by German philosophers and sociologists for more than a century; (c) in interpreting the fall of Europe and modernity, Ratzinger and German social theorists use the same secularized theology of Faustian doom, suggesting that German social theorists are theologians too. The paper tackles those issues and opens up new paths in the study of constituting cultural narratives in social theory. It also raises fundamental questions about sociology's assumptions relating to enlightenment and autonomy.
Tom Boland
School of Humanities,
Waterford Institute of Technology
Literature and the ‘method’ of theory: Experience and Conversion
While literature is frequently subordinated to theory as an empirical research or a subject for critique, this paper argues that literature can contribute to theorising. The ‘ancient quarrel’ of poetry and philosophy is analysed first as schismogenesis, then as playful competition for representation, then as two phases of the ritual process. This sets both theory and literature as responses to modern experiences which incite fresh problematisations and reflexivity. On this basis I suggest that literature or theory has the capacity for conversion, partially by critique but more importantly through recognition. From this, the paper suggests the ‘method’ of approaching literature by theoretically formulating the questions to which it answers. As a consequence, I suggest that much social theory diagnoses and represents society by representing the meaning of experience through partially literary symbols or concepts.
Keywords: Method, Literature, Theory, Conversion, Anthropology,
Theme: ‘On the use of ‘History’ and ‘Generations’
Panel 14
JonathanWhite
Lecturer in European Politics
European Institute
London School of Economics and Political Science
Periodising the Political: Reflections on the Concept of Generation
Often, and perhaps increasingly, social and political life is periodised with the concept of 'generation'. Whether it be in discussions of the ongoing sustainability of public spending commitments, of forward-looking duties of environmental protection, or the veneration of national heroes of the past, 'generations' are much invoked. This paper examines some of the political consequences of narratives centred on this concept, and the logics on which they rely, proceeding from the assumption that generations are primarily a discursive construction rather than an empirical fact. It identifies a series of salient contemporary examples of generation-talk, and in each case analyses the work to which the concept is put. At a general level, it is suggested that a world conceived in terms of 'generations' embeds a number of secondary ideas: it evokes a strongly harmonious image of society, externalising conflict away from the present into the past and future, and it asserts a combination of both social stability and change, the uncertain balance between which allows declarations of both continuity and rupture, of identity and difference. The paper goes on to consider who has reason to advance generation-based narratives, who may be disadvantaged by them, and in what global contexts one can expect them to figure prominently.
Joshua Lowe,
University of Warwick
Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History for Thought
Arendt's theoretical work is clearly concerned with addressing her contemporary situation, yet in her many of her most important works an analysis of historical worlds which could not recognise that situation predominate. From her early work on St Augustine, through the Human Condition, right up to The Life of the Mind, Arendt marshals her arguments over vast stretches of historical time. The ancient Greek polis, the Christian origin of the will, the commencement of a modern age, the birth and death, with Plato and Marx, of “our tradition of political thought”, and the “crisis” in authority are sources which determine us, and according to our understanding of them, may stifle or confuse us, or allow us to flourish. Perhaps Arendt's central question is “how has this situation come about?” I want to explore the reasons why this question, which overflows a “merely” historical interest by heuristically leading to Arendt's core concerns, opens up the possibility of a clarification of the modern situation in its implications for human existence. For Arendt, as with her teacher, Heidegger, and her contemporaries Karl Lowith and Leo Strauss, Western history from the ancient Greeks to the present time is employed to aid a fundamental reorientation away from prevailing currents of thought, both lay and professional. But this task is not, and could not be furthered by a mere comparative procedure, in which it might be declared that the Athenians had political action, while we do not. The historical sources that occupy such a large space in Arendt's works are of relevance for us and to her being a thinker of her times only in so far as history itself plays a distinctive, substantial role in her theoretical effort. Though her thought rejects “method” for itself, with its modern connotations of myopia or blindness to fundamental questions, I shall try to say something about why Arendt writes about the past in the way she does, and this is to attempt to identify the ways in which history is put to use by thought.
Theme: Intention and Imagination
Panel 15
Hannah A. Bondurant
University of Missouri-Saint Louis
The Role of Conscious Intention: A Response to Wegner’s Theory of Apparent
Mental Causation
In this paper the issue of conscious control will be examined in the context of Daniel
M. Wegner’s theory of apparent mental causation. Wegner proposes that our beliefs
about intention and the control we exert over our actions are actually based upon
other factors and usually occur retroactively. An overview is given of the physical
correlates of consciousness in the brain, the body, and behaviour with evidence for
control cited. Each principle of Wegner’s theory is looked at separately and
counterexamples found. I propose that consciousness and control are two different
categorizations in which there may be various levels.
Tomas Holecek, Ph.D.
Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague
Imagination - The Philosophical Foundation of Research Method
The field of research analysis in Sociology is commonly considered to be purely empirical and practical and its method is therefore considered to be only of a technical importance. However, the paper will focus on theoretical and philosophical foundations of the research method. I want to show, that the method of research analysis has its philosophical roots reaching far to the history of Science and that it can be conceived as a theoretical approach.
The proposed paper will aim at emphasizing the role of imagination in development and further elaboration of research analysis, using a comparison with classical philosophical ideas of image and method as they are presented in the early work of seventeenth-century thinker Rene Descartes, mainly in Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1628). Here, the original meaning of imagination as a basic research capability lies in its hermeneutic usefulness for life decisions, rather than in artificial model-building or solving this or that problem.
The reflexive use of images and imagination in science is now widely recognized as one of the most important turning points in its history; it makes possible the use of Algebra and General Mathematics in managing them and thus it started the great progress of knowledge in modern era. But together with development of mathematical methods, the use of images and imagination in Science opens the door for an understanding per se. Of course, this applies also to research analysis.
The foundational importance and actual use of imagination in research analysis will be demonstrated on Paul Lazarsefeld's exposition of the flow from concepts to variates. Despite the apparent use of terminology belonging to language analysis characteristic of a period style, it proceeds mainly by development and elaboration of images.
Theme: Theory and the Things themselves
Panel 16
Dr Rafał Paweł Wierzchosławski
Chair of Metaphilospohy
Catholic University of Lublin
Conflicting Expertise and Political Responsibility:
The Debate on the Retirement System Reform in Poland 2011
The famous dictum that “war is too important to be left exclusively to generals” (Clemenceau) reflects – in my opinion – one of the main problems of this year conference formulated by the organizers “Questions of method […] cannot be reduced to a search for means to satisfy given ends, but must incorporate a discussion of the very ends of social and human life, including the question of meaning.”
I will try to follow the above mentioned demand and to think “about the very end of social and human life” focusing my attention on a rather limited, nevertheless, a very important problem of political responsibility of the state as far as retirement system of pensions are concerned. The case of debate on the change of pension system in Poland which is going to be introduced in 2011 should be treated as an illustration of a more general problem of “methods of theorizing”.
During last year conference Stephen Turner has made some important observations: “The reality that modern states are, fiscally, vast pension funds with legal sovereignty […] All of these systems represent liabilities for governments […] These are handled differently in different national systems. But all of them depend on growth– there is no system that does not pay out more than it takes in, and the difference is made up by either investing what is put in, or by growth in the pool (and wealth) of contributors […] But more important, the retirement schemes are central to the whole structure of the national economies of the various states. The future obligations of the various governments are dominated by these costs.”
His remarks has been to me the stimulating highlight for formulation of the problem I would like to discuss this year. Turner ideas are also in play due to his seminal contribution to experts problem, and in liberal democracy in particular. I take his approach as a methodological tool to present the Polish case and I would like to consider to what extend this analysis can confirm one of his main hypothesis about the important change of democracy under the “rule of experts”.
In the first step I would like to present a general framework of pension system reform in Poland 2011 (which itself is the essential change of the former reform of the retirements system from 1999) as a case of costs problem of future state obligations, then to discuss the debate between opposing experts arguing for and against the governmental decisions, then to consider to what extend the conflicting expertise might have any influence upon the decision in question, finally I would like to discuss the problem of government—media-public opinion relations.
G. Smit, Research Centre for Communication & Journalism, University of Utrecht –The Netherlands
The quality of journalistic knowledge. A contribution of social science to a negotiable epistemology of journalism.
The quality of the knowledge spread by journalists, is commonly judged by criteria borrowed from naïve empiricism. Although it might be fair to use concepts like independence, objectivity and accurateness, to check the reliability of presented facts, this evaluative strategy leaves the public uninformed about the meaning of the message that is put forward. The ideology that journalists deliver the facts and the public should decide for themselves how to react on it, leaves the journalists’ ‘structures of signification’ undiscussed. In order to be able to give a thoughtful judgment on the social worth of journalistic productions, an evaluative concept is needed that sheds light on the way journalists identify order in the complexity of social life.
At least from the 1920’s onward it has been debated whether the social worth of journalistic knowledge could be enhanced by incorporating methods of social science. The quintessential discussion on this issue has been the one between Walter Lippmann, and John Dewey. Where Lippmann stated that public opinion should be based on empirical scientific knowledge, something that journalism could not deliver, Dewey believed, that journalism should be supplementary to science in the sense that it could help the public determine what would be taken into account as the shared understanding of the social world.
Since then serious attempts have been made to enrich the practice of journalism with methods of social science. In his book, Precision Journalism (1973), Philip Meyer states that science is definitely needed in journalism as the craft struggles to maintain its identity against corruption by entertainment and advertising. Science, he says, is still the one good way invented by humankind to cope with its prejudices, wishful thinking, and perceptual blinders.
Although Meyer’s approach has been valuable for the development of the branch of journalistic research that is, misleadingly, called computer assisted research (CAR), it had nothing to say on the implicit normative view on society of journalist, while implying that offering blunt facts is the one and only normative task of journalism. Moreover Meyer’s approach failed to deal with the qualitative research methods that are widely used by journalists.
The one book that introduced qualitative research methods for journalism, Qualitative Research in Journalism: Taking It to the Streets (Ioro, 2004), refrained to give a general method for qualitative research, let alone linking these research methods to an integral view on the epistemology of journalism that could be used as a guiding principle for evaluating the truth and value of the thus obtained knowledge.
The author suggests that such an integral view might be found in Charles C. Ragin’s Constructing Social Research (1994). Raging did not only develop a general overview of social research, but also found that among the many ways of telling about society that could be compared to social research, journalism offers the closest and most fruitful comparison.
An interpretative content analysis of written deliberations of Dutch investigative journalists was conducted to explore whether and how Ragin’s “Simple Model of Social Research”, which perceives social research as a dialogue between ideas and evidence, could be applied to journalism. This resulted in an iterative model for producing and judging journalistic research. Ragin’s model was adapted to the one big difference between journalism and science, namely the fact that journalistic knowledge is not valued by a scientific community, that is focussed on theory building and methodological rigor, but by the general public that finds meaning in the interplay between the perceived objectives of the journalist and the kind of stories that are told.
The thus developed model was found to do justice to both the complex epistemological status of journalism, and the need for an intuitively right concept to evaluate the hybrid form of social knowledge that journalism happens to be. This proposed evaluative tool could not only broaden the scope of journalistic knowledge, but also introduce an intersubjective measurement of performance.
Theme: Contemplation, Creativity, Thinking
Panel 17
Dr. David Toews,
Assistant Professor, Sociology Department, York University, Toronto
Bergson’s Call for a Renewed Vita Contemplativa
If social theory is to be the object of a new contemplation, let us examine the practice of contemplation – what denials, what questions, what uses and abuses for modern life does it give rise to? The sacralizing/spiritual aid function of contemplation was dead and gone for intellectual workers by mid-century. But what if a contemplative attitude carried on with equanimity behind the scenes of otherwise avowedly modernist forms of inquiry for practical reasons that don’t fit very neatly into modernist methodological narratives? Such a question makes it essential to extricate the problem of discerning the role of the contemplative in ongoing social and cultural theory from the debates in sociology that focussed on the Theme: of the sacred, arguing over whether the latter influences human thought and action as a principle of cohesion and integrity or as a diversonary chimera. I shall argue this is precisely the great, neglected value of Bergson’s last book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1977). It is remarkable less for its social and political analysis per se than for its secular-contemplative attitude of analysis Bergson aimed to convey to contemporary sociological thinkers as a way out of an activist-modernist intellectual zeitgeist riddled with materialist and consumerist – as he put it – frenzy. Approaching the work in this way, Bergson’s text suggests a way to trace the influence of the contemplative attitude submerged and unacknowledged in its modern inheritances. In my reading I argue Bergson’s aim is to unearth and highlight how sociologistic approaches in sociology, particularly those associated with Durkheim that take ‘the social’ to explain facts at hand rather than vice versa, had worked to bury the practical role of contemplation which he demonstrates is vital for the future of humankind in his ‘Final Remarks’ section. As a result, I want to emphasize that we will have established grounds for drawing a distinction between Bergson’s retrieval of a post-sociological contemplative pragmatism that can be a whole way of life – a renewed vita contemplativa – and the American versions of pragmatism which explored contemplative affect but never developed the latter beyond the Theme: of a passive or reproductive suggestibility.
Dr. Guglielmo Rinzivillo,
Senior Researcher and Professor,
Department of 'Social Sciences', SAPIENZA - University of Rome
SOME MODERN IDEAS ABOUT SCIENTIFIC CREATIVITY IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
My research interests in recent years have been devoted mainly to epistemology, the history of science and the role that social sciences deal in the current debate that is playing on 'science'. In particular, I was involved in the development of sociology in Italy, with particular reference to the history of science, ie a research area that, frankly, is much neglected by sociologists. … And here I try to enter the representation of your Theme: of the course, which is creativity, creativity that I intend to as intuition, because creativity is intuition, and that modern science can also be seen as epistemology, or as Theme: border. And, following your reasoning, I must say that this does not just sociology, in the sense that sociology does not seem to see the development of scientific frontiers as a Theme: of borders of a modern 'history of science'. In other words, an epistemological problem, a problem of redefining its borders... From the perspective of the relationship between fields of modern knowledge and creativity, we can certainly ask us where we can actualize the creativity are many and are unthinkable, because there are indeed numerous.
For example, talking about life sciences, biodiversity, development of biotechnology is very contemporary, very modern and heard, as well as talk about the earth sciences, energy, climatology, geophysics, water study, study volcanoes, physics, cosmology, quantum mechanics - think Albert Einstein said that quantum mechanics is like music! - Basic research, mathematics, development of numbers, playing chess, which then are all creative fields. But we can also cite the economy - including the green economy for example - globalization, growth, development, chemistry, genetics, biochemistry, chemical research base. Furthermore, we can cite the human sciences and anthropology, we can also mention the sociology of science, technology, space, climate, technological research, environment, health, health, medicine. Then there are the ethics of science, morality of research, bioethics, neuroscience, technology and new technology, applied science, all the issues of world peace, the war chemical arsenals, Research applied, the issues of development in the world of diplomacy, and this means that calls our contemporary creativity! And besides, we can mention the art of science, intersubjectivity, computer science, beauty, body, aesthetics, epistemology, music, visual arts, photography, and these are less specialized fields of knowledge but more important from the standpoint of the existence of a world where there is reference to what you want as creativity.
All these fields of knowledge have a very important reference to the intuition, ie the process that is part of the definition of creativity as an attribute of science and / or science. If this attribute was not first in science, probably today without it, the science does not become a field of knowledge.
Theme: Methods of theorizing the ‘social’ and the ‘political’
PANEL 18
Brian C.J. Singer, York University, Canada
Thinking the “End of the Social” in Relation to its Beginning.
This paper emerges from a much larger work, which examines the “discovery” of the social in Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws. And the larger work ultimately emerges from a larger disquiet, which I share with at least some of those who have declared the end of the social: i.e. that the sense of the term “social” has become so broad as to be meaningless and empty. By examining the “beginnings” of the social the hope, relative to the larger study, was to recover the “sense” of the discovery, when what it allowed one to say appeared new and innovative. In my reading of Montesquieu I uncovered four such “senses”, each one built on top of the other. Briefly, there is first and foremost a discovery by the political as it is made aware of its limits: the social as a horizon of the political, where the social plays the part of the real to the political’s symbolic. Second, a reverse movement where the political is examined from a social perspective, but which entails a splitting of the political between law and power, with power understood as presenting the real, while positive law retains its symbolic character. Third, where the social appears not as a horizon or perspective, but acquires a substantive character relatively detached from the political, at least in certain regimes: this supposes that the social appears as the bearer of a nascent symbolic order, with an order, coherence and sense of its own. The fourth and last sense speaks of “sociability” understood as a bond with a social—and no non-social--finality. What I want to try to suggest in this paper is that each of these senses of the social can provide us with some insight relative to the “end of the social”—the different ways this end is understood, and the strengths and limitations of these understandings.
Dr. Marcel Stoetzler
Lecturer in Sociology
Ysgol Gwyddorau Cymdeithas / School of Social Sciences
Prifysgol Bangor / Bangor University
Social theory as the critique of positivist politics
The paper proposes to examine Comte’s positivism as on the one hand, a principal inspiration, on the other hand, a not always openly acknowledged antipode of classical social and sociological theory. Comte’s conception is here understood in the first place as an attempt after the French Revolution to formulate a conception of societal reform (in whose service stands the positivist conception of scientificity, including the new science of sociology) whereby ‘order and progress’ make further revolutions as unlikely as unnecessary. The paper will outline Marx’s critique and rejection of authoritarian, ‘utopian’ blueprints for the better society (a stance later continued by ‘Frankfurt School’ Critical Theory) and argue that this critique included (implicitly) a critique of positivism. It will then focus on Max Weber’s argument that one has to ‘decide’ on which values to adhere to, and that this decision cannot be based on scientific enquiry. The paper will argue that both, Weber’s argument against the attempt to ground value-judgements in science and Marx’s critique of ‘utopian socialism’ constitute differing critiques of Comtean positivism, and point to the political implications of their differences. Thirdly it will suggest that Durkheim’s position is complicated by the contradiction between on the one hand, his commitment to individualism and on the other, his conscious recognition of Comte as a predecessor and his sympathies for (Saint-Simonian) ‘socialism’. By conclusion it will be proposed that the history of social theory could be written as a history of critiques of positivism and the difficulties these critiques run into.
Theme: Reflexivity
PANEL 19
Dr. Inanna Hamati-Ataya
Assistant Professor
Department of Political Studies and Public Administration
American University of Beirut
From Reflexivity to Reflexivism:
Rethinking Epistemology, Methodology and Theory in a Post-Positivist Era
This paper takes as a starting point the problems Social Theory has faced since the breakdown of Positivism as an epistemic, theoretical and deontological stance and the proliferation of a wide variety of Post-Positivist schools of thought that have failed to provide an alternative to Positivism as a coherent and empowering socio-cognitive practice. Taking the ‘reflexive turn’ in the social sciences as a central problematic – and symptom – of Post-Positivist thought, the paper redefines Reflexivity as an epistemic and methodological path that can lead to the development of a different way of theorizing that is neither oblivious to its own historicity, nor paralyzed by its acknowledgment of cognitive relativism. More specifically, I will show that Reflexivity can establish the grounds for a non-foundationalist epistemology that is both emancipated from the “Cartesian anxiety” and capable of generating a coherent research program that has empirical, historical, and ethical relevance. This research program can be developed within a cognitive framework that I propose to call Reflexivism, and that, as I will argue, is not only a sustainable and powerful alternative to Positivism, but also one that defeats Positivism at its own game by providing an independent epistemology whereby the notions of truth, objectivity and meaning are redefined in a way that is informed by our understanding of the real setting in which knowledge is produced.
Philip Walsh,
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, York University, Toronto, Canada
Hannah Arendt on Mental Capacities and Internal Conversation
In her late masterpiece, The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt explores the human capacities of thinking and willing from both a phenomenological and anthropological perspective. She concludes that they are contingent human abilities, and their power to be called forth is to some extent historically and socially mediated. The human capacities to think and to will therefore have histories, both in the anthropological sense and in the sense of the individual life-course. Arendt does not discuss what methods might be available for studying inner life, although her reflections on its absence in the case of Adolf Eichmann provide some intriguing clues. In this paper, I am concerned to compare Arendt’s insights into the life of the mind with recent work by Margaret Archer and others, who have sought to define the capacity to think as an ‘internal conversation’ and to devise methods to study its properties and forms. I argue that Arendt’s work provides the basis for both a critique and a refinement of the ‘internal conversation’ concept, as well as the related concepts of ‘reflexivity’ and ‘agency’, and that this has methodological (rather than purely theoretical) implications.
Dr Thanos Kastritis
Social and Political Thought (Sussex), my background being Sociology (Athens).
The concept of way: between self and society
Social theory has proved to be a fertile ground for the notion of ‘way’, which manifests itself in a variety of relevant terms and ideas. This proliferation can be attributed partly to a reflexive concern with method and therefore with the ‘ways’ in which we might approach our subject matter. But it is the engagement with society, be this formalised as degree of sociation (Simmel), figured in the interdependence of individuals (Elias), or sidestepped in favour of accounts of how actors make each other act (Latour), that ultimately resolves itself to an inquiry into our ways of living together – or remaining apart. At the same time, when concerned with practice and its instillment in embodied dispositions (Bourdieu), an intertwining of ways comes into place, forming a perspective, a sense of self, immersed into the very world that comprises it. These otherwise distinct moments of encounter with ways may be said to overlap on a very subtle definition of the term, that would consider ‘way’ as a transport of consequences between events. But while such an approach would allow for a seemingly continuous ontology of methods, mediating circumstances and actual or potential practices, it can only promise to be an opaque ontology: it would provide the means for validity, but remain silent on questions of validity; it would allow for ‘certain ways’, but offer no way to be certain; embrace change, but offer no explanation for it. Given this lack of added heuristic value, what would the merit be in rethinking self and society through an examination of the concept of way?
Theme: Epistemolog(ies) and substantive questions
Panel 20
Dr. Leah McClimans
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
University of South Carolina
Research Fellow
University of Warwick
Uncovering Meaning in Quality of Life Measurement
Measures in the health sciences often fail to incorporate substantive theorization. In this paper I examine one particular type of measure, Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) in conjunction with Hans-Georg Gadamer and Charles Taylor’s work in hermeneutics to illustrate how the use of theoretical reflection can (1) provide insight into these measures’ methodology and (2) improve our understanding of PROM’s constructs.
1) Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) assess patients’ quality of life or subjective health status. These measures do so by asking patients questions that have a standardized meaning. Researchers must use questions as their probe because, as they readily admit, constructs such as quality of life are imperfectly understood and lack a gold standard, i.e. patient responses are their only source of this information. Nonetheless, researchers often ignore the consequences of this necessity. Gadamer’s work on questions and their importance to philosophical hermeneutics helps to clarify it. Applying the logic of question and answer to PROMs shows that the questions researchers ask about constructs such as quality of life are also imperfectly understood, i.e. these questions should not be standardized. Accordingly, the appropriate methodology for PROMs is one that poses genuine questions to patients; questions that are open to reinterpretation.
2) PROMs are increasingly used to assess multiple facets of healthcare including effectiveness, side effects of treatment, symptoms, health care needs, quality of care and the evaluation of health care options. But findings from studies that use these measures raise questions about their ability to meet these expectations and thus the validity of these measures. For instance, patients frequently rate their quality of life as stable in spite of deteriorating health. Response shift, i.e. a change in one’s interpretation of quality of life or good health over time, is often blamed for these discrepancies. There is much interest amongst measurement developers about how to ameliorate the effect of response shift. Drawing on Taylor’s distinction between weak and strong evaluations, I propose, however, that the different and changing interpretations that are at the heart of response shift are natural. Although the questions posed in PROMs treat patients as weak evaluators, studies that listen to patients as they answer these questions show that they are better understood as strong evaluators. So conceived we can begin to use patient responses to understand better what it is to have a good quality of life.
Vittorio Bufacchi
Department of Philosophy
University College Cork
The Epistemology of Injustice: A Case Study in Naturalized Moral Epistemology
This paper suggests that Naturalized Moral Epistemology (NME) provides the best hope for a satisfactory and comprehensive study of injustice. In particular, the focus will be on three aspects of NME: the emphasis on empirical inquiry; the recognition that knowledge is a collaborative rather than individual process; and that all moral knowledge is inevitably partial and situated within a context of experiences marred by power inequalities.
Part I will give an overview of the idea of social injustice: what it is, how it relates to theories of social justice, and why it needs to be prioritized. Part II will focus on one specific dimension of injustice, recently highlighted by Miranda Fricker in her book Epistemic Injustice (Oxford 2008). Fricker explains that epistemic injustice is the withholding of credibility upon knowledge claimants, especially in relation to individuals belonging to marginalised or underprivileged groups. Part III will argue that endorsing the methodology of NME makes it possible for incidents of epistemic injustice to be exposed. Finally, Part IV will suggest that the testimonies of individuals suffering from epistemic injustice are more likely to acquire the epistemic status (and respect) they ought to have if NME becomes more widely embraced, accentuating therefore the importance of NME for the study of social injustice.
Theme: Methods and ‘ways’ in Asian Philosophies
Panel 21
Graham Parkes, Head of School of Sociology and Philosophy, University College Cork
Dr. Hans-Georg Moeller, Philosophy, University College Cork
Knowledge as Addiction. A Comparative Analysis
Theme: Working with our inheritance today
Panel 22
John O'Brien
School of Humanities, Waterford Institute of Technology
Recovering Ideals for the Present through the Ancient Greeks
A widely identified feature of modernity is the growing precedence of means over ends, with its focus being on economic and technological progress, while there is little reflection on ideals and standards that our society should be based on. Thus, in a world that is based on the development of means for the technical mastery of nature and society, in order to combat disenchantment, we must develop ways of thinking that regrounds us towards meaningful social ends. To this end the concept of 'political friendship' (Von Heyking: 2008) as the basis of social life will be explored. This concept was developed by Aristotle (sunaisthesis), though it is also evident in the work of Plato in Symposium and other dialogues, and exemplified in the character of Socrates. The paper will take two directions. On the one hand it will examine the particulars of the work these thinkers. On the other hand it will explore the historical and political development of Ancient Greece and Athens in particular to attempt to uncover how such an ideal could emerge in the first place. It will be argued that the source can firstly be found in material factors, such as the increased military importance of the lower orders through the emergence of the hoplite, phalanx and navy as the basis of the state, the relative importance of free labour and political dependence on the lower orders as a counterbalance against potential tyrants, that resulted in a process towards increased interdependence and as a result, increased mutual identification and a breaking of the self-regarding, rent seeking behaviour of the aristocracy. However, these factors are not sufficient, and it will be argued that we must also look to the cultural traditions that Athens grew from.
Colm J. Kelly
St. Thomas University.
Fredericton, N.B.
Canada
Durkheim, collective representations and contagion: the becoming-conscience of society
Durkheim conceives of society as evolving out of nature, and as it does so it develops higher levels of self-consciousness, just as higher animals have a greater degree of self-consciousness than lower animals. Society is both natural and it is in the process of rising above nature to the ideal. It is the becoming-conscience of nature. For Durkheim, then, society will gradually become better able to represent itself to itself. Its end-point is a complete and harmonious self-representation. Collective representations operate in an essentially ideal manner, reducing or eliminating materiality. Their idealism is, however, limited in one vital respect. The collective representations must be fixed upon a totemic emblem, in order that they can be symbolized and expressed. They are thus connected back to the material world, and a threat is posed to their ideality. The ideal force which is the essence of Durkheimian society must dominate and subordinate materiality, if it is to be essentially ideal. In order to subordinate materiality it must infuse itself into it, thus risking dilution and profanation. Contagion is the process by which ideality can both enter into and order materiality, and can be desacralized and materialized. Durkheimian society is thus split and precarious. The process which allows it to exist is the same process which prevents it from truly existing as it should be, that is, in an ideal form. The above reading is not primarily a critique of Durkheim. Rather it is trying to demonstrate an essential trait of Durkheim’s way of thinking. The social is at once a veiled essence, an "obscure" and "circuitous" secret which sociology must teach men to unveil, but at the same time it is in its essence, a totality, an all-seeing "conscience de consciences." If we attempt to formulate this paradoxical conception in a single proposition, we could say that society will always have been a self-present totality, once sociology will have made it fully conscious of itself. This reading is developed primarily in relation to The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, and is briefly compared and contrasted with the interpretations of Durkheim provided in recent years by such scholars as Warren Schmaus, Donald Nielsen and William Watts Miller.
KEYNOTE 1
Stephen Turner
Graduate Research Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of South Florida
“Classical and contemporary social theory: reflections on the “state of the art”
KEYNOTE 2
Piet Strydom
School of Sociology and Philosophy, University College Cork
“The Counterfactual Imagination”
In this paper, I propose to present contemporary Critical Theory's emerging self-understanding. To make this intelligible, two conditions must be taken into account: a growing awareness of the left-Hegelian heritage due to the convergence of Critical Theory and pragmatism, and mounting pressures emanating from the international debate about social criticism and critique to rethink and justify the concept of critique. Against its left-Hegelian background, Critical Theory's metatheoretical model of 'immanent transcendence' has been gaining prominence. This framework lays down the parameters for the way in which Critical Theory's methodological model of 'critique' has been taking shape in the context of the debate about criticism and critique. Central to contemporary Critical Theory, both metatheoretically and methodologically, is its characteristic counterfactual imagination.
KEYNOTE 3
Elizabeth Goodstein,
Associate Professor, Institute of the Liberal Arts, Emory University
Theory before “Theory”: Georg Simmel as Modernist Philosopher
What is referred to in English as “theory” is less a body of thought than an array of practices. Situated between the humanities and social sciences, both continuous and discontinuous with philosophical and methodological debates that are much older, theory as we think of it took form in the last third or so of the twentieth century. Today theoretical texts and strategies of thought are so distinctive a feature of our intellectual landscape that it is difficult to imagine scholarship without them. But theory has a history, even if the rhetoric of theory tends to the ahistorical. And the notion that one can “do theory” or “be a theorist” more or less independently of one’s disciplinary location is symptomatic of very specific historical, cultural, and intellectual circumstances. By returning to a moment before the establishment of disciplinary and institutional divisions that we now take for granted, “Theory before ‘Theory’” proposes to illuminate these circumstances, in which the disciplinary organization of knowledge practices is widely viewed as problematic and the meta- or transdisciplinary discourse on theory has come to be a virtual end in itself.
While Georg Simmel (1858-1918) is rightly remembered as one of the founding figures of modern social science, he insisted: “I am a philosopher, see my life’s vocation in philosophy, and only pursue sociology as a sideline.” Returning to Simmel’s work not in an antiquarian but in a genealogical spirit, this paper aims to illuminate the interdisciplinary significance of a thinker and writer who should, I contend, be regarded as a theorist avant la lettre. It centers on what may well be the twentieth century’s most significant mostly unread theoretical text: Simmel’s 1900 magnum opus, the Philosophy of Money.
In the face of unprecedented cultural, technological, and social transformations, Simmel inaugurated a modernist style of theorizing that drew attention to the philosophical and historical significance of the phenomena of everyday social and cultural life. Integrating sociological, historical, economic, anthropological, and psychological perspectives to reground reflection in the (historical, cultural) world of experience, his Philosophy of Money is less a sociology of modernity than a tour-de-force of modernist philosophizing. As Simmel put it, he addressed the “contemporary dissolution of everything substantial, absolute, eternal into the flux of things, into historical mutability, into merely psychological reality” by redefining the “central concepts of truth, of value, of objectivity” and replacing the old ideal of “substantial fixed values” with a “living reciprocity of elements.” By opening thought to a new sort of practice, a style of interpretation that comes to terms with the lack of ultimate foundations by disclosing the profundity of the everyday, the Philosophy of Money at once extended and destabilized the philosophical tradition. Situated at a moment before the establishment of the disciplinary order that contemporary theory attempts to transcend, Simmel’s work casts light on the significance of history for theory.
KEYNOTE 4
Kieran Bonner
Professor of Sociology, University of Waterloo, Canada
“Data, Methods and Understanding Social Action: The radical interpretive method of theorizing”
From a radical interpretive perspective (a configuration of the theoretic traditions of ethnomethodology, hermeneutics, and analysis), the distinction between primary and secondary data is itself secondary. Taking as a case study, sample newspaper accounts for the explanation of the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, this paper will demonstrate what is involved in a rigorously reflexive treatment of this talk as a discourse in a way that makes its pervasive cultural ground visible. The paper will seek to show that a sole focus on whether such characterizations are empirically accurate, by testing these newspaper accounts against primary data research (interviews, surveys), can fail to take up the way such accounts, when understood as a discourse, are instances of Weber’s definition of social action, making verstehen rather than statistical patterns central to the task of understanding. The latter analysis, it will be claimed, makes for, in the words of the conference Theme:, a more connected understanding between theory and method. Specifically drawing on, amongst others, Weber’s concept of social action, Schutz’s idea of the ‘stocks of knowledge’, Charles Taylors’s articulation of ‘intersubjectivity’, Berger’s idea of ‘bad faith’, McHugh et al's (1974) analysis of motive talk, Blum’s idea of ‘imaginative structure,’ etc., the paper will demonstrate the insights into culture (e.g., of contemporary Ireland) that radical interpretive theory and methodology can make.
KEYNOTE 5
William Outhwaite
Professor of Sociology, University of Newcastle
“Path Dependence Retrodden”
In the 1970s, Humean models of causal analysis were challenged from two main directions. Realists, notably Harré and Madden, followed by Bhaskar, advanced an alternative approach based on mechanisms. Jon Elster’s related model of ‘branching points’ in history was part of his analysis of counterfactual conditionals: to say that someone or something was causally efficacious is to commit oneself to the claim that in the absence of that thing or person matters would have been significantly different. The concept of path dependence, which had played a big role in institutional economics and historical sociology in the 1980s, seemed particularly suited to the postcommunist condition. It went to the heart of the questions confronting observers of, and of course participants in, the early years of postcommunism: how far the prospects for these societies were shaped by, firstly, the communist past (and for that matter the precommunist past) and, secondly, by the form of the handover of power and the initial decisions taken. This paper explores the usefulness of the concept of path dependence in this context.
Keynote 6
Arpad Szakolczai
Professor of Sociology, School of Sociology and Philosophy, University College Cork
The Political Anthropology of Social Theory
Since two hundred years social theory represents a sustained effort to reflect on the nature, characteristics and dynamics of the modern world, or the ‘spirit of the times’. Yet, at the same time it is also influenced by this same ‘spirit of the times’, and in manifold ways. Apart from the evident difficult of reflecting on developments of which oneself is part, corresponding to W.V. Quine’s famous metaphor comparing philosophers to sailors forced to repair their ship while at sea, such influences include political movements and ideological currents, including two world wars and a series of totalitarian regimes; various aspects of academic politics, including the prestige of the natural sciences, and the exigency to imitate them, but just as importantly the building up of various schools and empires within academia, with disciples transmitting misunderstandings of their professors as the sacred canon; the need to secure research funding; the manner in which academic concerns are mediated by the requirements of publishers, who for commercial reasons are only interested in publishing increasingly shallow and repetitive textbooks; the need to attract media attention, in order to become a ‘superstar’, and then repeat unceasingly the ‘trademark’ idea; or attempts to appeal to students by flattering and entertaining them in various ways. As a result of such impacts and influences, contemporary social theory is thoroughly entrapped in its own history, and what we transmit as our ‘canon’ is by no means a collection of the most important and innovative ideas of the last two centuries, as they should be, but the vector product of manifold political, ideological, administrative and economic considerations. In particular, previous mistakes are often thought to be resolved by a ‘synthesis’ of one-sided positions, which is clearly not satisfactory.
The task of each generation of social thinkers should be to reassess the canon and thus improve and renew the analytical value and force of social thinking. This paper will attempt to make a contribution in this regard partly by revisiting a series of intellectual controversies in philosophy, sociology and anthropology, around the legacies of Kant and Hegel, in particular as linked to Hölderlin, Dilthey and Nietzsche; the work of Durkheim and Durkheimians, in contrast to Mauss, Tarde and van Gennep, but also Radin and Bateson; the problematic reception of Max Weber, rooted in the nature of his own reading experiences; and the impact of the ideological divide after the Russian Revolution. The paper will attempt to fit such debates within a consistent theoretical framework by trying to give an account of the vicissitudes of social theory over the past two centuries, based on anthropological concepts like rites of passage, liminality, imitation, masters of ceremonies, tricksters, and schismogenic processes.
International Political Anthropology
Agnes Horvath, Bjørn Thomassen, & Dr Harald Wydra, editors of the Journal,
International Political Anthropology
“Anthropology and social theory: renewing dialogue via the classics”
This paper argues that anthropology may represent a perspective from where social theory can renew itself. The presentation therefore inserts itself within the history of a long conversation between anthropology and social theory. This discussion goes back at least to the Durkhemian school which saw the study of modern and "archaic" cultures as part and parcel of the same project. However, the disciplines of sociology and anthropology soon branched off in different directions in practically all universities in the world. The
view that would establish itself, especially in postwar social theory, was that the modern world represented its own unique constellation and therefore had to be studied on its own terms, with little reference to pre-modern or non-modern societies, as studied by classical
anthropology. In recent decades, the ethnographic method and the study of power from the "margins" became widely popular in the social and political sciences. Social theory has also come into at least superficial contact with anthropology via the "cultural turn". Yet this elevated status of anthropology and its method has involved almost no engagement with the theoretical luggage found within the discipline of anthropology.
Our premise is that the modern world may indeed not be so unique in all its features, and that it therefore cannot simply be studied on its own terms. This means, well within a Weberian perspective, that the particularity of the modern project can only be rendered visible by stepping temporally and spatially outside modernity. This of course means that social theory needs history; that there can indeed be no theory without history. Post-war mainstream social and political theory had worked from a central premise: that the modern world could
and should be studied on its own terms. This had produced what Elias (1987) identified as the 'retreat of sociologists into the present'. The return of historical sociology implies a questioning of this temporal boundary line. However - and this has been much less
considered - the same view of modernity as a self-contained and radically different world, with its own logics and with its particular social arrangements, was also what had led to the quite radical separation of sociology and anthropology in the post-war period. While it is
becoming increasingly recognized - indeed, mainstream - that social theory needs history, back to the axial age and beyond, the possible role of anthropology in theorizing modernity seems far less obvious. That role goes much beyond simply representing a view from "below", a politically correct appreciation of cultural diversity, or a taste for the exotic and marginal. It involves, we argue, attention towards key theoretical concepts developed within "classical" anthropology that uniquely facilitate a proper understanding of the modern world and its underlying dynamics. Three such concepts will be singled out for attention: liminality, trickster logics and gift-giving. The paper will also relate to the significant statement made by the organizers of this conference concerning questions of methods and how they relate to values and meaning: "Questions of method, or searches for the 'Way', just as the use of the powers of reason, cannot be reduced to a search for means to satisfy given ends, but must incorporate a discussion of the very ends of social and human life, including the question of meaning. Methods of theorizing are thus ways of attending to the world so as to bring
into view, contemplate and articulate Standards of beauty, truth and the good life; radiant Ideals that illuminate and make possible an understanding and interpretation of our present practices and institutions, thereby enabling our education and self-transformation
in light of such a Measure." Such a formulation calls for a discussion of Ancient Greece and the relevance of antiquity for the study of modernity. We argue that, beyond the schismatic religious divisions that marred the early modern period, and beyond the legacies of the Enlightenment project, entangled in mechanical rationalisation on the one hand, and the mere stimulation of the senses on the other, guided by an exclusively materialistic and utilitarian vision of the human being and its social environment, it is possible to take inspiration from Antiquity in order to spark a renewal badly needed in the increasingly crisis-prone
world. This renewal must take place at the level of philosophical anthropology and involves a return to the Classical world. The notion of 'crisis' and the claim that we live in the midst of a
'civilizational crisis' implies that a comparative perspective on the modern world must try to give an answer to fundamental questions of meaning, value and direction.
We here would like to draw attention to a key concept in ancient Greece, and actually much focused upon by anthropologists, but neglected in social theory: that of grace or graciousness. Sophocles could state that "Poetically Man Dwells"; that man is matter only in so far as he has affinity with the very essence of matter itself. Or put differently, poetical grace is that which "brings forward and forth". The concept of grace relates to other cardinal values in
Ancient Greek philosophy, namely harmony and beauty. These are not merely aesthetic perspectives: they provide a 'measure' or a starting point for theorizing social existence.
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[1] “The Order of Discourse”, in R. Young (ed.), 129Zaceuw² È
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íÙƳ¤•…x…i…ZK8$hÌf?hP..CJOJQJaJmH sH hÌf?h ùCJaJmH sH hÌf?h ùCJaJmH sH hš[pic]Dh ùCJaJmH sH hš[pic]D5?CJaJmH sH hÌf?h ù5?CJaJmH sH hš[pic]Dh ùCJaJmH sH hš[pic]Dh ùCJaJmH sH %hš[pic]Dh ùB*CJaJmH ph€€€sH %hš[pic]Dh ùB*CJaJmH ph€€€sH 'hÌf?h ù5?CJOJQJaJUntying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader (Boston, London, Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981).
[2] “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”, in The Foucault Reader, P. Rabinow (ed.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984).
[3] Foucault insisted that he did not offer a “theory” but an “analytics” of power.
[4] Badiou, Alain, Being and Event. trans. Oliver Feltham, New York: Continuum Books, 2005. p. xi.
[5] Meillassoux, Quentin, After Finitude. trans. Ray Brassier, New York: Continuum Books, 2009. p. 2.
[6] Meillassoux, p. 7
[7] Meillassoux, p. 3.
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